Resources

The Very Best Index Maintenance

We’re excited about a LOT of the features in Minion Reindex. Here are a few reasons why this particular solution is worth your notice:

Super easy install and removal, of course.

Easy MASS installation. One little Powershell script, and you can install Minion Reindex on hundreds of instances just as easily as on one.

Extreme granular configuration. Configure extensive settings at the default, database, and/or table levels with ease. And I mean every setting you can think of, from Fill Factor to sort in TempDB.

Order index operations by database and by table. This feature is very powerful; there are 2 levels of ordering at the database level, and another 2 levels for table ordering.

Flexible include and exclude. Reindex only the databases you want, using specific database names, and/or LIKE expressions. There’s even an advanced option to use regular expressions (regex) for excludes.

Live insight. Minion Reindex lets you see what’s happening while the routine is still running. See what Minion Reindex is doing every step of the way, and how much further it has to go.

Maximized maintenance window. Spend the whole maintenance window on index maintenance, not on gathering fragmentation stats. (Oh yeah, we let you schedule the frag stats gathering separately, if that’s what you want.)

Extensive, useful logging. Use the Minion Reindex log for estimating the end of the current reindexing run, troubleshooting, planning, and reporting.

Built in manual runs. Choose to only print reindex statements, and run them individually as needed.

Integrated help. Get help on any Minion Reindex object without leaving Management Studio.

Integration with Minion Enterprise

Installations of Minion Reindex can be integrated with Minion Enterprise (ME). Once configured, ME can pull index maintenance information for managed servers, folding MR into the enterprise suite of management, reporting, and alerting. Minion Reindex is the only way to get a complete SQL maintenance solution that caters to your entire SQL maintenance lifecycle. Email us at Support@MidnightDBA.com to get a 90 day trial of Minion Enterprise today!

features

faq

Minion Reindex is FREE. It costs approximately $0.00 (USD). You can download it as many times as you want, install it on as many servers as you want, look at the code all you want, add your own alerts, etc etc. Just don't offer our code to others, use portions of our code in your products, or put your own name on our code; if you're going to share the joy that is Minion Reindex, link back here to MinionWare.net. We also have an enterprise version, called Minion Reindex Enterprise, which is $250 per managed server. MR Enterprise allows you to centrally configure, manage, and report on index maintenance on all managed servers across your enterprise.Â Email MinionWare for a quote!

Short answer: xp_cmdshell is not unsafe. Once turned on, it's limited to system administrators by default. And we give you information on locking it down here in Sean's article: Security Theater.

Medium answer: Chances are, if you have a free backup and maintenance system in place that isn't Minion, it's using sqlcmd steps in the SQL Agent jobs. (We're talking about the Ola Hallengren maintenance solution, now.) This is actually not at all secure; it's turned on by default, and anyone who has rights to alter jobs can make changes to the step. See the Security Theater article for more information.

We get this question a lot. The honest answer is that we want to make tools that WE want to use. We didn't like the maintenance already out there, so we put our decades of experience behind Minion Backup, Minion Reindex, and Minion CheckDB. (And if you think those are good, take a look at Minion Enterprise, which blows the free modules out of the water.

Because while observing database problems is a difficult task, fixing the actual code is the REAL challenge. So while the two eyes are enough to pinpoint database bugs, the two extra hands come in handy when coding the bugfixes. And besides, just look at the size of those gorgeous eyes!

We have extensive documentation that includes full explanations, examples, and more. You can download it from our website, and it also comes embedded in the products themselves (see the Minion.HELP stored procedure). If you're a better visual learner, check out our Training page for videos that teach the concepts, and also discuss nuances and advice for configuring MR features. If you still need help after all that, feel free to reach out to us.

MR has a very easy setup. Simply run the setup script. MR installs with schedules and everything else it needs. We even help you do mass installations so you can roll it out to your entire organization as easily as you do to a single server.

testimonials

“These tools are simple to install and configure but are extremely versatile. And best of all free! But be forewarned, they really like documentation. Hour after hour of video and hundreds of pages of documentation are available (so far).”

“The level of detail in these [log] tables is fantastic. The IndexMaintLog table will give you a good overview of what has been done in each database, the execution time, the number of tables processed and not only the number of indexes processed but the number of indexes reorganised vs rebuilt…

“I like this solution, it's easy to deploy, configure and run.”

Jason BrimhallSalt Lake City, UT

“I am happy to see tools like Minion out there to help the "Accidental" DBA or NoDBA shops, well even enterprise DBA shops for that matter.”